I'm currently re-reading Ready Player One and all I can think about is the Oasis and Haptic Suits... Looks pretty interesting but I think that delivery window looks a little too optimistic...
There were plenty of references, but they were to the same '80s pop culture that the book worships. Really, all of the VR tech was just a plot device to create a magic world where that Gen X nostalgia never ends.
Ready Player One tells us about technology about as much as Ralph Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2 does.
I was really into learning new tech, new algo all in my free time and one day I got the ahah moment you describe and since then I have started reading fiction.
It's hard to imagine creative people gathered around a computer waiting for it to judge their newest creation as sufficiently original or not. I imagine the scene would make a great intro for a dystopian sci-fi novel.
"Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."
Beautiful example of article where the author was skeptical based on the wild west of the current state of technology. What current technology is the same? VR? Self driving cars?
Its no coincidence that most of the people building out the tech future were raised with fictional tech future of cyberpunk and cyberpunk-esque fantasies in their youth and have been steadily building those fantasies into reality - consciously or not...
> Some days I dream of a distant future in which an average being (human or otherwise) comes in contact with [today's technology].
> “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” -Arthur C. Clarke
That is precisely the premise of the "science & sorcery" genre or hyper-sci-fi as I like to call it, where relatively primitive people regularly stumble upon ancient technology that they can't hope to comprehend but use it for its incidental effects.
For example a smartphone may be good as a compact light source but not much else, or a hard drive for its shiny sharp discs and magnets.
See the Numenera RPG, set a billion (!) years into Earth's future after several civilizations have risen and collapsed: http://numenera.com
Heh it seems like every thread here is unknowingly referring to a sci-fi book. This computer has shown up a few times, notably in Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and another book I don't want to mention because it's something of a twist.
I have just finished yesterday Greg Egan’s Permutation City (a great read, even though I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone), which was published in ‘94, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the climate change theme in the story, although it was not part of the main theme.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
I swear I'd read some kind of "futuristic" news article (written in 2015, yes, but faking to have been written in the future). Was I wrong. ;-) Awesome nonetheless.
I really enjoyed the short novel "Automatthew's Friend" - it was written decades earlier, but the circumstances were something I could imagine happening in my lifetime (a helpful, robotic "friend" living in your ear). Then, a couple decades later, I tried Siri with Airpods, and had this staggering realization: I'm living in a sci-fi book, right here, right now. I arrived in that future world, and almost didn't notice.
I really recommend the story; it speculates on the impact of inviting "personal" technology into our lives. What's really bothering me, is that I needed to put a literal talking robot into my ear to realize what happened; but the same level of "personalization" of technology is already happening everywhere you look: PCs, phones, TVs, fridges, sound systems, timepieces, door keys, light bulbs... We're sticking a CPU, a network interface, and our credentials into all of these things like it's something completely natural, without stopping to think about the impact on our selves.
"GM mangroves that can grow in salinated intertidal zones and synthesize gasoline, shipping it out via their root networks, is one option."
That one sentence overloaded my system with a visual day-dream about the potential for our future - the way it's written evokes that famous Bladerunner line:
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. . ."
A few dozen words in both quotes that evoke such richness. Beautiful work.
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